The Girl from the Well

And then she sees Tarquin struggling to free himself, while Yoko Taneda and the masked woman loom over him, the first tracing tattoos on his skin and the other carving them out with a stone knife. He is screaming.

The dream shifts briefly, and she watches me run across a dark, nameless river, running after paper lanterns bobbing in the stream. And then the scene changes again, and now eight dolls are arranged neatly in a circle, and I stand inside it. As she looks on, I move around the ring, laying my hand on each doll.

“One.”

“Two.”

With each count, I change. My hair comes undone, more of it falling over my eyes.

“Three.”

“Four.”

The obi slips away, my kimono coming loose and undone as blood seeps into the fabric.

“Five.”

“Six.”

My skin loses its color and sags into unhealthy, blotched white.

“Seven.”

“Eight.”

And I disappear. Only the circle of dolls remains.

It is only then Callie realizes I am behind her, my hands burrowing into her yellow locks, warring with the thin black strands of my own.

“Nine,”

I whisper into her ear.

Callie looks down at herself. She reaches up at her own head and feels the tangle of disheveled hair, the glassy sheen of her own complexion and realizes that the horrifying visage in the mirror is not mine, but her own face.

“Yes,”

she says.

And then Callie starts awake, white-faced and trembling. It is lighter outside, two hours away from dawn, but she crawls out onto the porch, waiting for the sun until it breaks through the horizon, comforting her. When she looks to her left, I am sitting beside her, dressed as the servant I had been in my youth, with my eyes glued to the sky.

“Will Tarquin die?” Callie asks aloud, though she does not address this question to me. “Is he going to die today?”

This, I cannot answer.

? ? ?

The sunrise over Yagen Valley is beautiful. The air is crisp, and birds fly overhead, dotted against sky the color of peaches and lavender.

There is much to do for the ritual. All participants must first be purified, and Tarquin is embarrassed, turning away quickly, while the mikos show no qualms at taking off their clothes and bathing at what they call the Chinsei-no-yu hot springs, and they laugh at his flushed face. Taking pity on him, Callie brings him to the second onsen spring, where he is able to bathe and rest with none of the other teasing mikos for company. For Callie, the water feels unusually hot against her skin, a pleasant warmth that penetrates into her very being. If only everything could be this way—like a river, she thinks, where all things warm and light can float on forever.

After the hot springs, Tarquin is given a faded but comfortable yukata to wear. Callie herself wears a loose, formfitting cotton kimono Kagura lends her. Every stitch of clothing that the participants wear must also be purified and cleansed beforehand, down even to the socks on their feet. Already the other mikos are hard at work. They scrub down the altars, the wooden floors and walls, even the movable shoji screens, with sprigs of sage and more sweetgrass, even going so far as to wash the wooden porch and parts of the roof with sage and sweetgrass before sprinkling everything with more salt.

Kagura explains that the combination of sage and sea salt dispels the negativity of a particular place, while sweetgrass encourages positivity to settle in once the negativity has dispersed. The mikos perform this cleansing three times, once every hour, to ensure its maximum potency.